I am still alive but I’ve not really dedicated much time to blogging this year. Last Friday was my last day at Evolving Media. I enjoyed my time at EM, and they produce some quality work but I really want to move on to using more robust development practices. Namely using a versioning system again, when I first started there it felt a little bit like walking a tight rope without a safety net with no SVN.
I was also in denial about how much of an OO zealot I’ve become, the trouble is I’m not writing enough OO code to progress as quickly as I’d like. Not employing OO was basically a huge road block for starting test driven development, automated testing (continuous integration) and automated deployment. All of which are nice to have but come at the cost no one could afford at EM – time; victims of their own success in that regard.
As I’ve mentioned before, one thing I never really settled with was working on a Mac. Going to work on Mondays and hitting CTRL instead of the Apple key, and pressing those odd page up and down keys (they only scroll your screen and not the cursor).
I’d have the reverse situation at home where I’d keep hitting the ALT key instead of CTRL in Windows, ALT + right for End, ALT + left for Home and @@ for “”. As developers we use # symbols more than most and ALT+3 just isn’t convenient.
I think a six month run on OSX was long enough for me to decide I’m still a Windows fanboy, there’s some dev tools for Windows I’ve grown up on. I never found a decent replacement for Regex Coach (I even made a long over due donation the other day).
So where am I off to next? On May 21st I start at Alexander Street Press, an academic publisher based in the US that focus on the humanities. I’m looking forward to it; the two guys I’m working with, Paul and John, seem really knowledgeable, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.
I’ve a week to myself this week to tie up some loose ends. I’m hoping to get some more posts up here this week. In an ideal world I wanted to:
- Push my new blog layout live (3 columns tagged up with microformat goodness)
- Make a start on Groovy in Action
- Read more of PHP in Action
- Ditto for Agile Web Development with Rails
- Finally get Zend (PHP5) certified
But I can’t see me squeezing that all in…
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